2024 Retrospective Part 1 - Why Am I Doing This?!

Show Notes

Summary

Alex revisits the first 6 months, 25 episodes and 495 minutes of the podcast. In part one he recounts the circumstances that lead to him starting the podcast, and revisits the first 9 episodes.

Transcript

So I’m going to do something a little different today. This podcast has been going for just over six months now. My first episode was published on May 28th this year. And my last episode was episode number 25. We are coming up to Christmas and the New Year, or the holidays as the Americans would call it. And I figured this would be a good opportunity to pause and do a bit of a retrospective. So I’m going to go back through the history of this podcast, if you can call it history, after six months of existence. And I’m going to go back to the beginning and go through each episode and talk about what I covered in that episode and why I covered it and what my thinking was. And just work my way through right till now and try and give everyone a bit of an update on what’s going on, what’s happened, what happened since then. This is partially by way of bringing everyone up to speed who perhaps hasn’t listened to my historical episodes, so they don’t have to, although I urge that you do. And partly just as a reminder as to what I’ve been talking about and as much for myself as anyone else. And to try and tie this first era of my podcast together and really mark it as a bit of a landmark. And so before I get into individual episodes, it’s worth me talking a little bit about why I started this podcast in the first place. So back in November last year, I lost my job. I was made redundant. I was very positive about this. And it seemed like being given a bit of money to go and do something else was an essentially positive thing since I wasn’t particularly happy with the job that I was doing in the company that I was in. And that’s something I’ll maybe come back to another day. But I launched myself with a good friend and colleague of mine who was made redundant at the same time onto the job market where we tried to start up a little consultancy doing what we do without really having realized that we were doing so in probably the most hostile economic and trading conditions for what we do, that there has been in quite some time. So we largely failed. We spent a good four months trying to find clients and almost doing so and ultimately failing and money started to run out. And it had become clear to us that we were trying to do something which perhaps was just timed very poorly. And this had a very, very profound effect on my mental health, both the stresses of trying to do what we were trying to do and the quickly dwindling finances. And I had a pretty major mental health episode in I guess February this year. And that really hit me. And it took me a little while to figure out really what was going on and to admit to myself that I had had a pretty major breakdown. And I had to sort of remove myself from my daily doings and try and heal myself. But of course, the money was still being spent. We still need to eat. I still have a family, mortgage and bills to pay. And so I really didn’t feel like I was able to stop. And so I’ve got two sides to my world. I’ve got my day job, which is as a data scientist or an analyst, or at least it used to be. And I have my art. And so I sort of lent into my art, knowing for a while that it was a good therapeutic outlet for me. This isn’t a new concept to me. I originally restarted making art again in my forties as a part of a portfolio of treatments for mental health issues caused by unrecognized neurodivergence. I’m autistic and ADHD. And so I launched myself back into my art and was sort of trying to see if I could eke some money out on that side to varying levels of success. I had a very, very successful commission earlier this year. It was a massive lifeline to us financially. But ultimately, the same financial conditions, economic conditions that led to us being unemployed were dampening people’s likelihood of buying art. So that side of things really wasn’t particularly successful outside of this one commission. So my mental health, although was variable, was ultimately stuck in the low ebb. And I couldn’t recover because my situation just wasn’t changing. And I got caught in a sort of doom spiral that led to me not really feeling like I could get out of that. Anxiety perpetuates anxiety, doom perpetuates doom. And when you start to think, well, why am I so depressed or worried about life? And sort of look around you and then find out lots of reasons why you should be. Whether those reasons are real or significant enough is not really important to the depressed brain. The worst thing is coming up for air and noting that the world is still a complete mess. And the externalities in terms of what’s going on in the world at the moment didn’t help either. So anyway, in April this year, I don’t remember the decision to decide to make a podcast. It’s just ultimately one of many special interests that I’ve acquired through the years. Being all DHD, I tend to cycle through projects. And so something will catch my eye and take my interest. And I’ve almost launched myself into it without even noticing that I’ve done so. And so I clearly got, I remember one day not having thought about a podcast and then some point later having this idea that I wanted to have a podcast and that it was going to be about mental illness and art and art therapy. And I really don’t remember having much of an idea of what that would mean. But my original idea was that I would make art. I would sit there painting or drawing or whatever while talking about art and mental health and maybe as a sort of video thing as well. And I realized very quickly that doing that meant a lot of sort of extraneous noise that wasn’t particularly pleasant to listen to. And also half the time I would just stop doing what I was doing and start monologuing into the microphone without actually making any art. It seemed a bit superfluous. And so there was a couple of episodes I did early on that got binned. Although one of them is on my YouTube channel, it’s called My Story, which is me just sitting there in front of a piece of art talking about my journey. That’s called My Journey. And I realized that they weren’t really up to scratch. I didn’t want to launch a podcast that was out of the starting blocks, that ramshackle. So I invested in a condenser mic, a decent enough one to record it. And I started again and I sort of took what I’d learned from the first couple of aborted attempts and just launched into this. Welcome to my podcast. I’m recording from my garden studio. So you might hear some birds around me. Hopefully this is first of many episodes of my podcast. We’re going to talk about beginnings today. I love starting things. For example, podcasts. I’m not so good at finishing, but I don’t really intend to finish this. Hopefully this is an ongoing thing. Since then it’s gone through quite a few different iterations. I’ve tried out lots of ideas and experimented with lots of formats. And actually most of them I’ve just sort of stuck with coming back to them and reprising various different formats and approaches. And I’ve covered quite an array of subject matters. Although I have a list of ideas and subject areas I want to cover angles on subject areas. And I’m not even close to being through that yet. I don’t think I ever will be. I can just go out walking of a day at the moment and I’ll come up with several more and half the time I even forget to write them down. So I’m not going to run out of material anytime soon. I’ve had reasonable success getting people to listen to this and they say it takes a while to build up a podcast, maybe a year. And I’ve only been doing this for about over six months. And I think I’m doing pretty well. I have a fair amount of listeners and hopefully that will grow. But I’ve really, really enjoyed doing this. And for me, keeping a project like this up for six months is nothing short of astounding. And goes to the core of the fact that this type of thing is an itch that I need to scratch. I like to talk, but I’m not a brilliant conversationalist because I really like to talk. I’m your classic autistic monologuer. And this really gives me an opportunity to do that and to do that in a format that suits me and that I can talk about the things that I want to talk about. But I built a podcast centered around two of my main interests or two of the things that are most important in my life, art and mental illness. My classification of art is pretty broad. I get to talk about lots of different stuff that I love, which isn’t just, you know, paintings or whatever. It’s music and movies and TV and stuff like that. And I’m really talking to anyone doing anything creative. I like creative people. I like creative things. So as far as I can tell, because I’m a very precious individual, I’m still committed to this. And I’m still excited by this and I can intend to keep doing it. But maybe I will, maybe I won’t. You can never really tell with me and my life circumstances could change for the better or God forbid for the worst. I’ll update you on my situation as we go along, as it’s relevant to the arc of this podcast. But I do think this will probably read a little bit like a story. And I’ll try not to dwell too much on any one thing. But I’m going to go through it. I’m at least 10 minutes into this already and haven’t even started with the episodes. So I should just get on with that. So episode one, May the 28th, 2024, titled Beginnings. I’ll start by acknowledging my intro for this podcast. I don’t really like it. It was created fairly quickly without much thought because I realized I needed something at the beginning and that music is some sort of royalty free music that I found on whatever app I was using at that point. I’m fine with what it says. I don’t particularly like the way that it sounds and I’ll probably replace it at some point, but I have no idea what I want to replace it with. So I’ll leave it as it is for the moment. Episode one, I was really just finding my feet here. I talk about beginning a podcast, but also beginning artworks, beginning projects, beginning any creative enterprise. And I introduce the concept of therapeutic value of art and I go into something I should really revisit, which is procrastination. So instead of talking about starting things, I’m talking about why you might not start things. And I think this is one of the most important factors in terms of people getting into or continuing creative pursuits. Is it getting started is often the hardest thing, especially if you’ve got out of the flow or you’ve never done it before, or you’re nervous or you’re trepidatious or whatever. It’s really hard to get moving. And so I’ve got an episode here on acknowledging procrastination as one of the main barriers and setting it up as a, to a certain degree, a trauma response in terms of being fearful of starting. And then I also talk about things like creative block and then general noise of modern life. I talk a bit about my neurodivergence, my studio, how I’ve set it up so I can just get moving onto things. So removing barriers from, from getting started, having your stuff around you is a concept I’ll come back to quite a lot. Now it’s worth bearing in mind that I am, I’m in a bit of a fugue state at the moment. I’ve just finished a really big commission that was really amazing and creative and some of the best work I’ve ever done. And I’ve sort of stopped and so much of my creative energy and my time went into that. But I didn’t stop. I didn’t. I immediately started making new canvases. I immediately started playing around and just making a mess. And I took some old ideas that I had and I just started playing around with them and shoving them on canvases and they’re not very good. And I’m looking at one now thinking, ah, it’s actually okay. It’s fine. And maybe I’ll pick it up later today or maybe I’m just going to stick it aside, but that’s just fine. And I almost look forward to that moment when I get back to it. And then I go a bit into my history, which I won’t go too much into today. There’s plenty of that out there. In these early days, I was a lot more practically focused. I feel I got a lot more philosophical as things went along and that’s less of an editorial choice on my part and more just a natural outpouring of who I am as a human. I think a lot. I’m a deeply, I’d like to say philosophical person, but I don’t spend a lot of time reading philosophy. I think a lot about the nature of existence and so on. And also things like the value of art and the pursuit of aesthetics and things like that. And it’s going to come spilling out. I think I set out my stool as being deeply sort of introspective and open about my personal problems and struggles. And I think that’s absolutely central to the core thesis of this podcast is that people will relate to that. People don’t want to be patronized and told by some psychiatrist about the way that they’re feeling from someone who’s probably got little to no experience of it. People respond and empathize with stories, especially when those stories reflect their own experience. And people will recognize where those stories are concocted or genuine. And therefore you need to be honest about your health problems so that people can empathize and relate and feel less alone and excluded. And this is especially important for mental health problems. I have a propensity to overshare. That’s not always a good thing, but from the perspective of this particular endeavor, it’s a bit of a superpower. I have to just get used to the fact that there’s no barrier between my brain and my mouth. And I’ve learned to a degree to make that work for me. And this podcast is to a degree a reflection of that. Oh, and I talk a bit in here about bringing your whole self to the process. This is a bit of a weird and complex one. And it’s not a hill I’m going to die on because I feel like I’ve contradicted this a bit in later episodes. But if a barrier to starting is this need to somehow come out and start spewing out your authenticity onto a canvas or whatever, that’s just nonsense. It doesn’t really work that way. Creativity is incremental. And you can’t expect to turn up with your whole self, with your whole concentration and spill out the authentic you from day one. It just doesn’t work like that. You’re spilling out your authentic you from day one, whether you want to or not. It just comes out in dribs and drabs on gushes and dribbles when the conditions are right to do so. And if you turn up to your easel and you’re not quite feeling it and you stick a podcast on or whatever, and your only sort of part there, that can actually set up the best conditions for letting things just flow through whatever it takes to get you to relax and just get on with it. And so pretty much my whole time in my workshop, my studio, I have podcasts on or audio books and stuff. And I’m only really half tuned into them, but I’m really bad at doing one thing at a time. I’m very easily distracted. So it actually helps me. If that’s me not bringing my whole self to the process, then so be it. I’m good with that. But to be honest, that particular aspect is part of my whole self. So why would I not do it? I’m going to move on to the next episodes. So this is episode two, May 29th process. And this is the most arguably the most important part of my core thesis, which is that the end point is not the point. The point is everything that happens in between when you start and when you finish and everything that happens all the other times too, that this is not about a single piece. This is not about a technique. This is not about a visit to your studio. This is about everything that you do. But assuming you actually make some art at some point in the future, you’re in the process of making that art right now, even if you’re sitting on the bog. The point is that any of the process is all of the process. And since you can’t produce that work of artistic genius without having eaten, then eating was part of that process. Zen Buddhists take this concept really seriously to the point where Zen’s primary text, Master Dogen’s Shobo Gendo, contains lengthy chapters on eating, getting dressed and going to the toilet. The value of art and creativity as a therapeutic outlet is that it’s not showing this lovely landscape that you painted to people that’s going to make all the difference. That’s just one event. It’s actually the whole thing. And if you never show your work to anyone, then that’s all good because you’re missing out on something there, I believe. But really it’s been the process of making that, that did the job. It’s the time in front of your ears or the time you’ve spent outdoors with your camera or whatever it is that you do, with your instrument, with your piano or your guitar. Those are the bits that are the therapeutic bits. And it’s all about this process, about having a framework within which you can do these things and experience them while they’re happening. And you should be really trying to sort of enjoy that process. Every single part of that journey is important and you should consider it so. Because otherwise you’re sitting there thinking, oh, I’m really impatient to get going. When you could just be sitting there thinking, well, I’m actually going, right? This is good. I’m doing the work that I need to do to treat my mental health. This thing that seems quite menial and boring is just another part of the process and it’s all wonderful. So I go into Zen in quite a bit in this episode. And this is a Zen Buddhism is a concept I come back to a lot because it’s been really important in terms of my understanding of this particular concept around process. So I’ve revisited quite a lot and I’m going to revisit it again. I’m really sorry if you don’t like it, but this is who I am. I talk a bit about tidying my studio, which is one of the other themes that I come back to, which is although at the moment my studio is like a bomb site, I periodically tie it up, tidy it up as a bit of a reset. And I really enjoyed that part of the process, even though I’m not the sort of person that particularly enjoys tidying things up. I love tidying my studio, but I don’t do it a lot. I used to think that this is because I’m lazy, which is sort of the case. I am a bit, but I’m also usually quite busy and prioritise making art, assuming that the studio isn’t too messy to do that. But these days I like to think that I save it for the special occasions when I’ve really got the time to appreciate it. And having a tidy studio is such a gift, so much so that it’s often been an impetus to make more cool stuff once it’s tidy. When you think about it like that, it’s obvious that tidying the studio is part of the creative process, not an impediment to it. What we’re saying here is that the process and the product are the same thing, which makes sense when you think about it. The process is right there on the canvas or the page or the camera, along with all the other bits of you from your life experiences and stuff you experienced that day and all the other things you were thinking about at the time. So if you listen to any historical episode that I’ve made, is this my best episode? I don’t really know. Probably not. Is it the one that sets out the stall for what this podcast is really about? Yes, this one, even more so than episode one. Episode two on process is really at the absolute heart of my whole thesis around art as therapy. So let’s move on. Episode three, June the 4th, 2024. It’s called Perfectionism. Back in the early days, I really liked the idea of these one word titles that are really to the point. I started off only doing this, but these short titles don’t necessarily resonate with people because they don’t know what you’re talking about. I buy that. But also the algorithms need more fodder to understand who and where to direct people’s attention. So almost everything that gets published, it’s going to find itself in some sort of algorithmic selection will optimize the title because it’s one of the key ingredients in terms of driving both visibility in searches and driving attention and click throughs or whatever it is you’re after. And I know this, I’ve been working in digital marketing for decades. Perfectionism is a huge barrier, I think, to people, especially when they’re starting out. The angle I take on this one is that perfectionism is essentially judging yourself by someone else’s standards. I think people like me, autistic people and other neurodivergent subtypes can be quite bad at taking criticism. And we are people pleasers. And through a life of underlying sort of trauma through dealing with neurotypical society and all its weirdness and getting stuff wrong all the time, we tend to be quite fastidious on trying to get things right because it’s not pleasant when someone criticizes something you’ve done. So what is perfectionism? In the context of the creative process, maybe it’s easy to define what it’s not. The opposite of perfectionism is knowing when to stop, knowing when a piece of art is finished, ready to ship. One of the most important skills you learn as a creator is knowing when to stop, when to stand back and say that’s enough. It’s not as easy as you might think. Sometimes, but very rarely, a work is obviously finished, just as you conceived it to be, done. This has never happened to me, not least because I don’t plan my works, they just tend to emerge. So the idea of done is a little more fluid. In terms of trying to emulate someone else, all you’re doing is setting yourself up for a failure because you’re not them. You cannot produce what they produce because you are not them. You don’t have their brains, you don’t have their life, their materials, you don’t have all of this. You’re going to fail, unless of course you’re a forger, but that’s a slightly different conversation. But it leads to some pretty destructive behaviours and possibly is the one thing that causes people just starting out down this creative journey to bail out and to give up because they feel like they can’t achieve something that they shouldn’t be trying to achieve anyway. But understand this, the only opinion that really matters is your own. Other people tend to tell you things that you want to hear for all the nicest possible of reasons. That earlier supposed masterwork might well just be an average early work that found the right eyes. After all, Bob Ross has a lot of fans, but did you really want to get off the bus at his stop and stay there forever? Even if you did produce an actual item of genius, that was then and this is now. And did we not talk already about art being all about the process? Move on, your life may depend on it. Whatever form your perfectionism takes is always destructive and rarely leads to actual good works. Usually it leads to flat, finicky, emotionally stunted works or just an overworked brown mess that gets discarded or even worse, no work at all. And it always, always leads to misery and disillusionment. Perfectionism is an evasive animal that prefers not to be seen but hides in plain sight. It is a rationality masquerading as common sense. You should always just focus on what you’re doing right now and judge it on its own merits and just go with your instincts. Moving on, episode four, sharing, June the 10th, 2024. This is about, or this is why my one word titles don’t work because sharing doesn’t really mean a whole lot and I talk here about exhibiting or showing your work. I’d start off a bit talking about Emily Dickinson here, a poet who only published 10 poems in her lifetime but actually wrote hundreds and is now considered one of the most important poets of all time. She’s an amazing poet. If you’d like that stuff at all, I would advise you to go look it up. But she didn’t want to publish her work. It didn’t seem necessary to her and when she did so, they didn’t treat her work with the respect it deserved. So she didn’t bother but her sister found it all and published it to the world. The point here is that you don’t have to show your work. You don’t have to share it with people to experience the therapeutic value. But I then go on to argue that if you feel that you can at all, you really should because this stuff is so important and art brings people together. Showing your art to other people is a really important and valuable part of the whole feedback cycle and driving feelings of self-worth. Yes, I was still exhausted and broken. In some ways, the worst was still to come as my situation in the real world continued to worsen. But I faced that stuff down with renewed strength because I felt like I mattered. These are the building blocks of recovery and this time a recovery that took a lot less time than it usually would. And those little threads of positivity I spun spread and created a web, some of which I could see via the positive repercussions of that event, and others that I knew would be there because I knew that any sliver of hope in my world made a difference and so any little glimmer of positivity I can create in another’s world must create ripples of positivity that spread. Even if they only spread a little way, they matter. Small things matter. Every little gift counteracts a small hurt. Every sliver of light, no matter how small, gives someone who is suffering a reason to carry on. And as an artist, you’re in the privileged position to be able to create such moments by doing something that you love. This is what we exist for as artists that are out there and sharing our stuff. We are helping change the world in some little way, or maybe even some big way. And so I spent this episode urging you to show your work. This is one of the ones where I get quite deep into some of my problems and how starting to exhibit my work really helped lift me out of my various holes that I found myself in. Also how for me sharing my art, exhibiting is a way of connecting with people in a way as an artistic person I struggle to do because people come and talk to me about something I want to talk about. And that’s really important for me. It’s allowed me to build a community. It’s allowed me to build an audience. It’s allowed me to talk to people I would almost certainly never have done so. And meeting so many different diverse people, doing so many different diverse things and so many interesting lives. And it’s really enriched my life and this has happened. And I just wouldn’t have done all of that otherwise. So I make an impassioned plea to show your work, but also if you don’t want to, don’t put yourself out there if you’re the sort of person that’s not going to benefit from it. Okay, so sharing number five, space. This is another bad title. Space is about making sure that you have the space in your life to create. And this is both in terms of space in the more literal sense, i.e. do you have a room or an end of a kitchen table or something that you can use regularly and with impunity to create. And then also in terms of time, do you have the space in your calendar on a regular basis to create. And this is a bit harder and less obvious than it sounds. And I think we’ve always got something we’re supposed to be doing. But if you don’t take some time in your life to do something that allows you to wind down and relax, you’re going to make yourself ill. So that could just be watching the TV. It could be time with your kids. It could be walking the dog or playing with your dog or your pets. It could be any number of things, but we talk about art here. And it’s almost especially hard to find time to be creative because you do need to set aside a certain amount of time. Having a dog is really useful because you have to walk it at least a couple of times a day, which gets you outside. And if you’re the sort of person like me who likes to be outside, it’s good to have a reason that’s pretty much unassailable. I have to walk the dog, so I have to go outside. It’s not quite the same with art. Why are you buggering off now? Well, I want to go and do some painting, but you’ve got to do the chores. Well, OK, OK, I’ll do the painting after the chores and then you don’t get the time where you’re too tired and you can easily completely slip out of the habit because it becomes something in your life that simply isn’t necessary and thus gets pushed aside. The more busy that your life gets and the more you’re getting sucked into your mobile phone and doom scrolling or dopamine hunting on whatever game you’re playing. And suddenly there’s no time for creativity anymore. If you’re serious about building art into your life, then you need to be more purposeful about this. It’s best to create some time in your schedule, preferably at the same time every day or whichever days of the week makes sense and book these out. Arrange with anyone concerned that you’ll be completely out of commission for that time. No questions asked. Not best efforts. Not unless something comes up. That time must be sacrosanct and respected, especially by you. Find some space where others can’t easily barge in and own it. Even when you don’t really feel like it, you go and do something because this is my time because the moment that you or anyone else starts to feel like that time is optional, it will disappear, right? So you’ve got to go and do it. You’ve got to use that time and having it scheduled in your diary means that everyone knows what’s going on and no one has any reason to disagree with you buggering off and doing this because this is what you’ve agreed and get the people around you to agree that you can do it. It’s a really, really important point. Now, it doesn’t mean you can’t go off and do it other times. If you can find the time, if you can sneak off or you’ve just got some free time, it’s just simply making the space in your diary so you can do it at all times and you can continue it. Because if you’re anything like me, if for one reason or another I have to take a week or two’s break, I sometimes find it very difficult to get back into it at all. So make the time, make the space. Right, episode six, experimentation. This was one of my unscripted monologues. Most of these episodes are scripted. You can really tell the difference and you can tell that this one isn’t scripted because I go, yeah, sort of like and all these things all the time. Whereas my scripted ones, I write a script, I read it, I try and make it sound as little like I’m reading a script as possible, but I cut out any, you know, half the lines get said twice because I don’t read them properly or I get stuck in almost mental, I get completely jammed up. And there are certain things, certain types of alliteration that I find it almost impossible to say. It takes me about 20 bloody attempts. So then I have to go through and edit them, which takes ages. If I really want to get my point across and make it specifically, me monologuing like this, I’ll often miss stuff or think that I’ve said stuff in a coherent way, but really haven’t. And I think that I can really undermine my own points. So if I’ve got something really very specific to say, and I want to make sure that point gets across our script, but this was the point where I started. This is episode six experimentation, June 23rd. I pretty much I had an idea of what I wanted to say, and then I just monologued it. And I started off talking about Radiohead and how I listened to a podcast about them, how they use experimentation as part of their recording and writing process. I think my general point here was around how experimentation is important to the artistic process and the creative process. So things are kept fresh for both you and for your audience. And so that you’re pushing yourself forward and you’re trying new things and the process doesn’t get boring or repetitive. And even if you feel like you’ve got to produce a fairly standardized output, because that’s your product and you’re a business, you need to build time in your schedule to just play around. And that’s where the real fun happens. And it’s where even as a sort of fairly standardized product, you do need to evolve it over time. You do need to keep it up with the times a bit. It’s like Apple releasing a new iPhone every year, just to keep up with the technology advances, but also so people have got something new to buy, something different to buy, especially for your regular customers. So I think I make an impassioned case for experimenting a lot here, both from an artistic perspective and also from a mental health perspective. Yes, you do need to be a better writer, a better poet, a better painter. Yes, you do need to get better at playing guitar or the piano or the violin. Yes, you do need to practice and yes, you do need to do the drudgery, the boring practice at times. But most of the time, that’s where, as I explained in my earlier episodes, is that’s the most important part. That moment where you’re laying down another scale over and over again, where you’re practicing the same piece of music, where you can just suddenly meander off and find some creativity in your motions and your movements and your muscle memory, where you can lose yourself in the music, that little trigger, that little extra thing that allowed you to meander off and do something different. These are the most important parts of the creative process. These are the most important parts to the therapeutic value of creation and artistry and excellence. And so you should embrace the practice, but always look for those moments to jump off and run with them. Episode number seven, stories. So this was July the first, 2024. So this was an episode where I get a bit more personal. Ultimately, it’s about telling stories through art, but particularly your stories and how stories are important to convey meaning and information in culture. Stories resonate with people in ways that just giving them information or brow beating them or whatever don’t. And I talk a little bit about storytellers, but really the backbone of this one is me recounting my story in two different ways. One that sounds all quite positive and almost like a linear journey between my childhood and where I am now. And leaving out really all of the tough bits that tell the actual story. It feels a little bit like a fairly happy, comfortable journey from kids to artists via life and travel and marriage and family. Once upon a time, there was a teenage boy. He was awkward and odd and kind of shy. He had a friend who was kind of odd like him, whose house he would go around to watch fascinated as he drew bizarre pictures of vampires, zombies and superheroes. It was all a bit Stephen King. Anyway, the boy was enthralled. He wanted to do the same. He also wanted to make stuff like the stuff he saw around him, like posters, all that sci-fi stuff that was everywhere in the early 1980s by illustrators such as Drew Struzan who did all of that amazing Spielberg stuff, as well as those incredible Iron Maiden album covers by Derek Riggs. He started making his own pictures, initially like his friend, then trying to copy all the other incredible stuff he saw around him. And then I recount it again from the point of view of really what was driving that, which is a string of difficult circumstances and troubled existence and mental health episodes and so on. And pretty much all of the major plot points in my journey were driven by extremely harrowing and prolonged mental health issues and things like bullying, being bullied while I was at school and death of my father and all sorts of things. And how that and that manifest through my art and how I tell my story. It might not be linear, it might not be obvious, but there is a story there. The man sits in his car staring blankly at the office of a technology giant, his employer, beset with feelings of dread and utter hopelessness. He had a job that many would be envious of, paying eye-watering sums of money, yet he felt worthless. The idea of getting out of the car and walking into that office filled him with horror, just like it had the day before and the day before that. Rewind to a few years before that. The man sits by a swimming pool in Crete. His kids splash carelessly before him, his wife dozes contentedly beside him. Everything seems idyllic. He can’t understand why he feels so miserable. Rewind to some point in the mid 80s. The boy is writhing in absolute terror as his so-called friends, one holding each of his limbs, suspend him over the storm drain. They told him that the evil zombie Arthur Grimstike lived down there and that he would launch a spear out at the boy and kill him. This was not the first time this had happened and it wouldn’t be the last. Stephen King’s novel It hadn’t been released yet. It didn’t matter to the boy. He was terrified anyway. And it can be seen, and I could probably line up my works in such a way, that they broadly represent the epochs in my life. And they would tell a story to me and I really don’t know if that works for anyone else. I think it probably was after this that I wrote a book of sorts. I set out to write almost like a brochure, I guess, for my work so that I’d have it just on PDF so that people could download on my website and get a taster for what I’d do and maybe it’s something I could use to stimulate newsletter signups. And what I ended up doing was writing, taking some of my favorite of my works throughout my period as an artist and writing what I just thought were my thoughts and some sort of loose story. I didn’t think about them as poems, but it was pointed out to me after I published this that they are poems. So I guess I take that and some people have said they think they’re pretty decent. I’m not a poet and I don’t claim to be so. That the progression of that book is called The Fall and you can download it on my website if you sign up to the newsletter, alexloveless.co.uk. It’s quite a sad, dark story of my sort of recent struggles and the story of my last sort of year that I’ve recounted some of and sort of bringing in multiple different characters, many of which just are avatars for me and talking about how it feels to be in a situation like this. And hopefully leaving it on a slightly more hopeful note, although things were going to get worse after I did that. You know, it’s available to go and look at, but that’s me telling my story. It’s coming out all over the place and my story is important to me and I’ll come back to the idea that you niche yourself into all of your artworks in a later episode. And date, July the 7th, my first therapeutic outlet is called Therapeutic Outlet. AI will not replace you. These are the ones where I say I’m not going to script anything. I’m just going to talk about what’s on my mind. And at this point, AI was a lot on my mind. It’s been a very big talking point across the media and across society for a good year now because you’ve got these language models and image models that can create some quite impressive stuff with very little prompting. And it’s got the creative world flipping out because, and quite rightly because these models were trained on their work and can produce work that’s at least superficially like theirs and perhaps superficially enough that people will accept it or just completely ignore their work because they’ve got something that’s roughly like it over here and it’s cheaper or freely available. And people are freaking out about this and that creativity is doomed from a human perspective because AIs can do it. Now I could monologue on this one for hours and I do come back to it from time to time. I’m not sure if this is something people really want to talk about or for me to talk about, but it’s quite central to my existence since a large part of why I find myself out of a job is because my profession as a data analyst, as a data scientist is one of those jobs that I didn’t realize but I now understand it has been largely already kiboshed by AI because people think they can do analysis themselves by typing some words into chat GBT or whatever, which to some extent is true but I’m not going to go into why I don’t believe that is a really a sensible way of doing things but that’s not for this podcast. AI is impressive and I use it myself forms of AI in terms of some of my digital art and some of the source material for my physical art, not quite in the same way as using Dali or Mid-Journey to produce fully finished AI art. I use it as a home-grown AI to do a very specific thing that I find very very satisfying. I’m not against using AI as part of the creative process I’ve used it increasingly to help me make sense of my growing body of text information, i.e. the transcripts for these episodes, my notes, my research. It’s really useful for helping me do research and pulling that stuff together and then consolidating it and so on. So I’ve got a lot to say on AI because it’s very very central to my existence even though I’ve got some serious problems with it in terms of its efficacy but there’s a moral element here with regards to how bad it is for the environment and so on. So it’s a knife edge, it’s a really difficult area given what I do for a living and on both sides of my life, on professional and the art side, it poses a constant sort of internal battle for me. So I’m not going to bang on about it. My point here in this episode is you’re not going to be replaced because and I might come back to this particular point from a slightly different angle which is that art is culture, culture is created by humans. Computers can’t create culture. Humans can create things using computers and help make that culture. Culture can choose, a culture of humans can choose to take the outputs of AIs and make that their favorite culture but that’s still humans creating culture. So does that mean that creative jobs are at risk and creative industries are at risk? Absolutely yes. Does that mean that creative thinking and the source of creativity coming from humans stops and it only comes from machines? No that’s ludicrous. Machines can’t create culture, only humans can create culture. You know just think about the fact that when photography first came about in the late 19th century people thought that that meant the pictorial arts were dead, that painting was a finished art because why would I want to paint a picture of that woman there when I can just take a photo of her and to an extent it sort of did kill off the strongly pictorial representational art to the absolute benefit of the art world as a whole. Initially the photography world was aping the classical art world and then the classical art world moved into impressionism, post-impressionism, expressionism, abstract expressionism into all forms of mad abstraction and the art world and the art discipline got richer because of it. Right next episode breaking the rules this is episode number nine July 14th. I love this one I remember writing this while sitting on the floor in an airport I can’t remember I was going I think I’d been down to London and I was on my way home and I was in quite good spirits because I’d had a really good time and I went down to see my sister and she had a party and it had been fun I got a bit of a break from the grind of my existence it cost me almost no money to get there and I stayed in her spare room so it was a cheap journey and so I mean I was talking about rebellion with this one about you know the fact that you’re expected to do things or you think you’re expected to do things in a certain way there’s one right way to do these things or what a small number of right ways to do any given thing and how that’s really antithetical to the spirit of art and doesn’t really matter what you do because art culture or human culture changes around you and so one minute you’re supposed to do this and the next minute you’re really not supposed to do this and it’s really hard to keep up and therefore the idea that there are rules that are somehow sacrosanct and not changing with time is nonsense and so I make a plea to experiment here and to do whatever it is you want to break the rules to do something different and you know if you’re doing what everyone else is doing then how are you going to stand out how is anyone ever going to notice you? If repetition is the death of art then uniqueness is its beating heart. Art thrives on novelty. Art requires novelty. Just try and record the radio heads on without permission and see what happens. I dare you. And you know what stifles novelty? Rules. Bloody rules. In fact it’s arguable that rules exist specifically to curb novelty. The game of chess wouldn’t be much fun for anyone if people only followed the rules that they liked. I sort of knew this was going to be a long episode and I mean I’m not even halfway through and so I’m going to stop and I may just publish this and do this in two parts but I guess we’ll see how we go. So I’m going to stop there. The next episode is suffering for art which is a pretty deep and dark one and I don’t want to rush that so I’m going to take a break now and I’ll see you on the other side. It does occur to me that creating things that are unbalanced if it gives the viewer a slightly uncomfortable feeling and in some ways that’s mission accomplished but I have to like the things I make because that’s how I know when they’re finished and when things are out of kilter when they’re not balanced I very much struggle to ignore that. So I always end up meddling because it’s like an itch you got a scratch or like a stain on the carpet or something that just bugs you it’s irritating I don’t want that there I’m going to go and clean it off and so that’s what happens I meddle and sometimes that’s for the better and sometimes it’s really really not.